UKH

Was looking at picking up a few cheap FPS games in the Steam sale, because clearly blowing up aliens is the best way to spend the summer.  My PC is quite old - it's an i7 920, 12GB RAM, NVIDIA 9800GT.

Looks like I should be able to run Quake 4 and Doom 3 without too much trouble, but do I have a hope of being able to run the 2016 version of Doom?  I suspect the GPU is my problem... will it stutter along at a reduced framerate and resolution, or will it just refuse to work at all?

Looks like it might struggle on the GPU ?

Minimum Spec (720p)

Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 (64-bit versions only)

Intel Core i5-2400 or better / AMD FX-8320 or better.

8 GB RAM.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 (2GB) or better / AMD Radeon HD 7870 (2GB) or better.

Up to 22GB HDD space.

Steam account.

Broadband internet connection.

Your CPU is fine, my sister played it on a 920. The 9800GT however is less fine, being a 12 year old GPU only supporting OpenGL 3.3. I played it on a Radeon 7970 with the Vulkan renderer and there were only a couple of parts of the whole game where the framerate dropped below 60, and they seemed to be issues with culling as nothing much was visibly happening, but that is four years newer than the 9800GT at a time that saw massive inter-generational improvements in GPU performance and rapid API development.

Thanks, both.  Looks like a new GPU might be in order.  The one I have was the cheapest available when I built this in 2008, so I guess it's not surprising it's now starting to struggle!

Moore's Law both gives and takes away

Last time I played Doom I had to modify the config.sys and autoexec.bat to change the order stuff loaded into memory and ensure that I had at least 560kb free of 640kb (or something close).

Sounds like they've increased the .WAD size since then

I think ID opensourced the Doom engine and you could run on a proper PC (Linux) these days.

Modern gamers don't know what they're missing

I've got an old Ti-85 somewhere...

It's a bugger, isn't it? I guess I should be pleased that my 12 year old PC is still actually reasonably able to keep up, with only minor upgrades. 

I got the current RAM for free; one of the original 2GB sticks started playing up a year or two ago, and when I went to Corsair to see just how well their lifetime guarantee performed, they said that they didn't make any 2GB triple-channel memory any more, so they couldn't replace the faulty one, and they're very sorry but would I accept a 3 X 4GB Vengeance set instead?

"You're twisting my arm there, but since you're being so nice I will have to reluctantly accept your offer this time."

Having not built a PC or bought one for many years i can't believe how bloody expensive GPU's are now having had a quick look !

Buy 2nd hand on eBay. New generation cards are silly prices, last year I bought a GTX 980 for £100. It will run 2016 games like Doom perfectly.

Something like a GTX 1060 would be a decent second hand buy at the moment.

That's my plan.  CEX have things like the GTX 760 4GB for £65 with a two year warranty - benchmarks suggest this will keep me out of trouble for a while to come. I just need to get into the PC and check what capacity I have on my PSU now...

So the good news is that I have a 600W PSU (48A on the 12V rail), and plenty of room inside the case, so it looks like I could fit more or less what I wanted in there.   A quick calculator tells me that with the 9800GT I'm drawing 27A, so there's masses of spare capacity for the new GPU.  And I can see a spare 8 pin connector to the PSU so that's fine too.

But here's something I don't understand.  I cannot, for the life of me, see where the current GPU is getting its power from.  There is definitely no direct connection from the PSU to the GPU.  Could it be drawing it through the motherboard?  I thought that was only possible for very low powered cards - and whilst the 9800GT is not exactly quick, it's apparently using 125W; could it possibly be getting that through the PCI-E slot?

Yeah, if there's no cable, its getting the power via the slot.

So google tells me that a PCIe x16 slot can supply a maximum of 75W.  Has my old card always been starved of power, then?

I guess that they only draw their full power ratings when working hard, so actually it's generally been OK.  And given that I haven't melted my motherboard, it either has some sort of throttle that limits the card to not pulling too much power through the PCIe or I've just never worked out that hard.